Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Standard Equipment 49ery I argue for is installed in every neurologically normal human being.The differences among people may have nothing to do with the design ofthat machinery. They could very well come from random variations in theassembly process or from different life histories. Even if the differenceswere innate, they could be quantitative variations and minor quirks inequipment present in all of us (how fast a module works, which moduleprevails in a competition inside the head) and are not necessarily anymore pernicious than the kinds of innate differences allowed in the StandardSocial Science Model (a faster general-purpose learning process, astronger sex drive).A universal structure to the mind is not only logically possible butlikely to be true. Tooby and Cosmides point out a fundamental consequenceof sexual reproduction: every generation, each person's blueprintis scrambled with someone else's. That means we must be qualitativelyalike. If two people's genomes had designs for different kinds ofmachines, like an electric motor and a gasoline engine, the new pastichewould not specify a working machine at all. Natural selection is ahomogenizing force within a species; it eliminates the vast majority ofmacroscopic design variants because they are not improvements. Naturalselection does depend on there having been variation in the past,but it feeds off the variation and uses it up. That is why all normal peoplehave the same physical organs, and why we all surely have the samemental organs as well. There are, to be sure, microscopic variationsamong people, mostly small differences in the molecule-by-moleculesequence of many of our proteins. But at the level of functioning organs,physical and mental, people work in the same ways. Differences amongpeople, for all their endless fascination to us as we live our lives, are ofminor interest when we ask how the mind works. The same is true fordifferences—whatever their source—between the averages of entiregroups of people, such as races.The sexes, of course, are a different matter. The male and female reproductiveorgans are a vivid reminder that qualitatively different designs arepossible for the sexes, and we know that the differences come from thespecial gadget of a genetic "switch," which triggers a line of biochemicaldominoes that activate and deactivate families of genes throughout thebrain and body. 1 will present evidence that some of these effects causedifferences in how the mind works. In another of the ironies that runthrough the academic politics of human nature, this evolution-inspiredresearch has proposed sex differences that are tightly focused on repro-